Natural experiments and the educational context: The environment and effects of an alternative inner-city public school on adolescents

The 1-year impact of attending a public alternative high school on two cohorts of adolescents who gained entrance to the school through a lottery was studied. Adolescents who had applied to the school but were not selected in the lottery served as a control group. The nature of the alternative high school environment is described, and the outcome of this natural experiment defined in terms of reactions to school, attitude change, and student achievement. In general, the alternative school positively affected student satisfaction with a variety of aspects of school life and induced some positive change in interracial attitudes while not harming student achievement. Race effects were found in the areas of achievement and interracial attitudes. Implications for the study of natural experiments in general and the specific data in particular are drawn.     

Perpetuation of gender inequality: A content analysis of comic strips

One vehicle for the perpetuation of gender inequality is mass media. The form of mass media addressed in this article is comic strips. The underlying ideology is that gender inequality is detrimental. The article examines findings from two studies: an over-all comic-strip page study and an indepth study of three comic strips. Results from both analyses reveal that comic strips do perpetuate gender inequality. Findings show that men are represented far out of proportion to their true ratio in the population while women are represented far under their true proportion. It is shown that comic strips are reflective of American society in some ways but also give a distortion of reality — one detrimental to men and women. Guidelines are suggested for the correction of this situation.The author gratefully acknowledges the editorial assistance of Dr. Butler, Dr. Mirande, and Dr. Sagatun on this project.     

Stressful Job Demands and Worker Health: An Investigation of the Effects of Self-Monitoring1

The hypothesis that self-monitoring would moderate the relationship between work stressors and health was tested on a sample of 136 registered nurses. Results showed that subjects who were more other-directed and who were more concerned with situational appropriateness had more mental and physical distress when exposed to higher levels of work stressors.     

Religion and children with disabilities

Religion as a personal coping resource used by parents of infants and toddlers with disabilities has received some attention in recent literature. This exploratory study involved indepth interviews of 12 parents who had children with disabilities ranging in age from 15 months to 30 years. The ways in which religion can be used as a coping resource across the life-cycle are exemplified through excerpts from these interviews. Prayer, church attendance, and specific religious beliefs were identified as sources of support which helped some parents feel a growing sense of hope and strength. Suggestions for future research are discussed.Tess Bennett, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the University of Illinois College of Education, Department of Special Education; Deborah A. Deluca, B.A., is in the Department of Educational Psychology, and Robin W. Allen, M.S.W., is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Work at the same university.     

What did I eat yesterday? Determinants of accuracy in 24-hour food memories

Large-scale diet-related epidemiological work relies on the quality of self-reported food consumption. As this epidemiological work forms the basis of knowledge of the relationship of diet to disease, it is essential that the self-reports of personal diet are understood. It is generally accepted that foods consumed are under-reported, even over as short a period as 24 hours. However, little is known about the potential systematic biases that may affect the quality of self-reported food intake. The current study examines the accuracy of memories of the consumption of snack foods eaten in the previous 24 hours and investigates factors that may bias these memories. All participants had previously participated in a randomized intervention trial to lower dietary fat intake to 20 per cent of calories. Fifty-six women (intervention and control) tasted eight snack foods in a laboratory setting. They were telephoned a day later and asked to recall the type of snack foods (M&Ms, pretzels, etc.) and the quantity of each food they consumed. Subjects in general under-reported the number of selections and the quantity of each item consumed. Women who accurately recalled an item, reported more liking for that item compared to those who forgot the item. Women currently maintaining a low-fat diet were less accurate in their recall of low-fat items than women on a high-fat diet. Low-fat eaters, however, may be slightly better at recalling how much of certain foods they consumed. Results have implications for survey research and understanding the psychological influences on reports of food consumption used in large-scale diet studies.     

The Relationship Between Performance on the Gordon Diagnostic System and Other Measures of Attention

Tests purporting to measure attention were administered to college students to examine their relationship to three relatively new tests of attention from the Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS). All subjects received the Standard Delay, Vigilance, and Distractibility Tests of the GDS. In addition, 69 of 136 subjects received the Digit Span, Arithmetic, and Digit Symbol subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), and Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test. After the GDS, the other 67 subjects received the Visual Span subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R), and the Stroop. Replication (across two studies) and gender influences were not evident on GDS performance. Performance data on this test for these 136 college students, collapsed across replication and gender, are presented. Although within-test correlations were strong, correlations between tests were weak. A ceiling effect on the Vigilance task may have effected its correlations with other tests. Results suggest that the GDS tasks are not substitutes for commonly used tests of attention, but may be useful as an additional source of information in the assessment of attention.     

Cross-cultural Variation in the Importance of Psychological Characteristics: A Seven-country Study

The Psychological Importance (PI) of personality traits is defined as the degree to which they provide information useful in understanding and predicting behaviour. University students from 7 countries (Chile, China, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, and the United States) rated the PI of each of the 300 items of the Adjective Check List along a 5-point scale. PI was shown to be a meaningful (i.e. reliable) concept in each country. Comparisons of PI ratings between pairs of countries indicated correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.73, with a mean of 0.49 among the 7 countries. A variety of additional analyses indicated that six of the seven countries tended to group themselves into two clusters: (1) China, Nigeria, and Pakistan; and (2) Chile, Norway, and the United States. In the second cluster, trait importance had a curvilinear relationship to trait favourability (i.e. both good and bad traits may be important) whereas in the first cluster trait importance and favourability had a linear relationship (i.e. only good traits may be important). The findings were suggestive of substantial cross-cultural differences in the importance assigned to psychological traits.     

Evaluation of a Measure of Self-Esteem Based on the Concept of Unconditional Self-Regard

A measure of unconditional self-regard (USR) derived from Rogerian (client-centered) theory was evaluated in four studies. Results indicated that USR was highly reliable and was strongly related to other measures of self-esteem and negatively related to depression, anxiety, and symptoms of psychological distress. The measure was significantly related to the control and commitment dimensions of psychological hardiness but not to its challenge dimension. Evidence for discriminant validity was provided by findings that USR was unrelated to social desirability or private self-consciousness. Finally, female students'self-regard was significantly related to the unconditional positive regard they reported receiving from their mothers. Other correlations between self-regard and perceived regard from others, although nonsignificant, were often large in absolute value. Implications for counseling interventions are discussed.     

Gender Differences in the Dimensionality of Social Support1

Although theoretical frameworks have been developed and research has been conducted in the area of social support, little attention has been given to the influence of gender on the dimensionality of social support. In addition, much of the research on social support has been conducted solely with student samples. In the present study, two samples (students, N = 304, and working adults, N = 301) completed a social support questionnaire. The survey instrument measured four types of social support (appraisal, instrumental, informational, and emotional) from four different sources (supervisor, coworker, spouse, and friends). For the student sample, women reported higher levels of social support than men on most dimensions (i.e., 11 of 16 dimensions), with 5 yielding statistically significant differences. For the sample of working adults, men reported higher levels of social support on most of the dimensions (i.e., 10 of 16), with 5 representing statistically significant differences. Differences in results between the two samples are discussed.